January 22, 2009

Barack Obama looks likely to win his battle to keep his beloved BlackBerry
smartphone, when he goes inside the White House bubble.

The President-elect, the world's highest profile "Crackberry addict", has used
the cellphone as his connection to the outside world and has been strongly
resisting the advice of security staff and administrators to hand it in.

He would be the first president to have his own personal device and use e-mail
routinely.

Mr Obama said in a CNN interview. "I think we're going to be able to hang onto
one of these. I want to be able to have voices, other than the people who
are immediately working for me, be able to reach out and — and send me a
message about what's happening in America."

A final decision had yet to be made, according to a transition spokeswoman.
The new administration has to iron out problems surrounding the security of
the handheld device and how e-mails and other messages would fit into public
record laws.

Mr Obama is widely touted as the first "wired" President of the United States,
keen to use technology to communicate directly with the American people.
"Obama 2.0" has more than 1 million MySpace "friends", 3.7 million Facebook
supporters and a YouTube channel. He has posted weekly video addresses as
president-elect as part of his change.gov website which is poised to become
WhiteHouse.gov tomorrow.

Why We Made smARThistory
For years we have been dissatisfied with the large expensive art
history textbook. We found that they were difficult for many students,
contained too many images, and just were not particularly engaging. In
addition, we had found the web resources developed by publishers to be
woefully uncreative.
We had developed quite a bit of content for our online Western art history
courses and we had also created many podcasts, and a few screencasts
for our smARThistory blog. So, it finally occurred to us, why not use the
personal voice that we use when we teach online, along with the
multimedia we had already created for our blog and for our courses, to
create a more engaging "web-book" that could be used in conjunction
with art history survey courses. We are also committed to joining the
growing number of teachers who make their content freely
available on the web.

A Short History of smARThistory
smARThistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic
enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional and static art
history textbook. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker began
smARThistory in 2005 by creating a blog featuring free audio guides in
the form of podcasts for use in The Museum of Modern Art and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soon after, we embedded the audio files in
our online survey courses. The response from our students was so
positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history
web-book. We created audios and videos about works of art found in
standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically
and chronologically, and added text and still images.

We are interested in delivering the narratives of art history using
the read-write web's interactivity and capacity for authoring and
remixing. Publishers are adding multimedia to their textbooks, but
unfortunately they are doing so in proprietary, password-protected
adjunct websites. These are weak because they maintain an old model of
closed and protected content, eliminating Web 2.0 possibilities for the
open collaboration and open communities that our students now use and
expect.

In smARThistory, we have aimed for reliable content and a delivery
model that is entertaining and occasionally even playful. Our podcasts
and screen-casts are spontaneous conversations about works of art where
we are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy.
We have found that the unpredictable nature of discussion is far more
compelling to our students (and the public) than a monologue. When
students listen to shifts of meaning as we seek to understand each
other, we model the experience we want our students to have—a
willingness to encounter the unfamiliar and transform it in ways that
make it meaningful to them.
We believe that smARThistory is broadly applicable to our discipline
and is a first step toward understanding how art history can fit into
the new collaborative culture created by web 2.0 technologies.

January 09, 2009

Amid all the action leading
up to Obama's inauguration it is easy to forget that there is still an
issue very close to the President-Elect's heart that has yet to be
resolved: that of the fate of his BlackBerry.

Speaking with CNBC Wednesday,
Obama explained that he is still fighting to hold onto the device
despite the sea of lawyers who have warned him against keeping it.

I'm still clinging to my BlackBerry. They're going to pry it out of my hands.[...]

I don't know that I'll win, but I'm still--I'm still fighting it.
And--but here's the point I was making, I guess, is that it's not just
the flow of information. I mean, I can get somebody to print out clips
for me, and I can read newspapers. What it has to do with is having
mechanisms where you are interacting with people who are outside of the
White House in a meaningful way. And I've got to look for every
opportunity to do that--ways that aren't scripted, ways that aren't
controlled, ways where, you know, people aren't just complimenting you
or standing up when you enter into a room, ways of staying grounded.

COMMENT:

I dont know... Ever since we let them have electricity at the white house it's never been the same.

Maria Gilbert of the Getty Museum started an interesting (and, I’m
sure, evolving) conversation this morning about institutional “brands”
on Twitter. The discussion was sparked, in part, by a recent post from Ari Herzog assessing the Museum of Modern Art’s
own online presence. Twitter, and specifically how to use it in an
institutional capacity, has of late been a hot topic at the Met
as well, and the time seems right to lay out some of my own thoughts on
the subject. Welcome to my New Year’s resolution to write more here at
kovenjsmith dot com. Woot.

I think that the process of trying to figure out how to use
so-called “social media” platforms like Twitter and Facebook has
essentially accelerated the disintegration of what we used to call “the
institutional voice”; that single, monolithic, thoroughly-vetted voice
that spoke to you, the visitor, from a given museum’s publications,
press releases, and Web site. As more and more low- or no-cost
publishing platforms have become available over the last decade, we’ve
seen an erosion of this single voice, as individuals from institutions
are able to publish more quickly without going through a traditional
vetting process. The question for museums is then: when that voice is
gone, what replaces it?

I find, on Twitter, that institutional or company feeds are always
less interesting than personal feeds. They’re informative, to be sure,
and often highlight things about a given institution (a work of art, an
upcoming program) that I might not have otherwise known, but they lack
that certain personal angle that makes for a really good feed.

The problem is that a feed that speaks for an entire museum must, by
its very nature, often remove the personal and/or provocative from its
tweets in order to appeal to the broadest possible constituency.
Therefore, the problem is less “what should we write about?” and more “from what perspective should we write?”

I agree with Tyler Green
that the primary focus of a museum feed should be Art, but an
institution can’t be as free with its opinions as an individual can be.
If an art museum were to say something like “this portrait looks like
Billy Dee Williams” in its Twitter feed (and let’s hope that happens),
I’d have to wonder, as a follower, whose perspective that is. Does
someone in the marketing department think that? Does the curator? An
educator? The Web site director? As an institution, then, we’re reduced
to posting somewhat bland tweets–daily highlights of works from the
collection (something better suited to an “Artwork of the Day” desktop
widget), or advertisements about half-price admission days (which
probably belong in a marketing newsletter).

However, this problem of perspective goes away if you replace that single feed with a diversity of feeds from your staff.

Think about it. Friendships in the virtual space are not much
different from friendships in real space. I’ll never be “friends” with
MoMA, no matter how much I may love it as a museum, but I could easily
imagine being friends with MoMA’s technology people, its curators, its
educators, or its conservators. MoMA The Institution might not feel
free to say that a particular work in its collection is sub-par, but a
curator on MoMA’s staff might be willing to tweet at length about why
that work is sub-par. I may not agree with that perspective, but it’s
still an interesting one to read (and potentially joust with as well,
via @ replies). As a follower, I’m not engaging with the institution
per se, I’m engaging with one of many possible viewpoints
from within that institution. This would have the end result of
actually connecting me to the institution in a much more powerful (and
one would hope, lasting) way.

This doesn’t mean that a single institutional feed has no value. In fact, as Tim O’Reilly points out in a recent post, he finds that his own Twitter feed often works as a kind of switchboard, connecting his followers to individual feeds within O’Reilly Media.
One could certainly imagine an institutional feed taking this role,
functioning almost as a party host introducing various guests to one
another.

Although it seems likely that Twitter is about to break into the mainstream,
we’re all still really trying to figure out how best to use it. It’s
not a blog, it’s not e-mail, it’s not a Web site–it’s something
entirely different that, I believe, has the potential to fundamentally
change the way museums interact with their public. In “Remix,” Lawrence Lessig
states that “…despite the rhetoric of the content industry, the most
valuable contribution to our economy comes from connectivity, not
content. Content is the ginger in gingerbread–important, no doubt, but
nothing like the most valuable component in the mix…” It will be
interesting to see if this will become true for museums as a result of
engagement with platforms like Twitter.

h/t to Joy Garnett (from the Goldwater Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) for the Lessig quote.

Koven J. Smith
is the Musical Director of cornfield dance, as well as a producer of
interactive technologies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an
adjunct professor of Information Technology for the Visual Arts at New
York University. With a background in electroacoustic music, formal
composition, and new media design, Koven's work explores the
intersection of multiple art forms and technology.

It was a tough morning swallowing Spencer's
review. My reaction was -- "really, that's what you see in the book?!"
None of the key points that made it worth my writing the book were
visible to him (or at least, as evinced by the review). And that,
frankly, was astonishing, and astonishingly depressing.

But it is the end of the day (here in Hong Kong), and with it comes a review by Kathleen Fitzpatrick,
that is actually about the stuff in this book that is what the book's
about, and new (and of course, as I think, important). What the book
"is" of course is hard to say. But her review is actually a review of
the book I thought I wrote.[...]

"What does it mean to society when a whole generation
is raised as criminals?" This is the question that intellectual
property guru and "copyleft" leader Lawrence Lessig asks in his new
book, Remix. He's building on a point he first raised in his influential volume Free Culture:
if we are going to declare a "war on piracy," we need to be prepared
for collateral damage. The blowback that Lessig explored in Free Culture
was felt by traditional U.S. culture, with its modes of open exchange
(libraries distributing books, for instance, as well as teenagers
making mix tapes) and its reliance on a growing public domain to spur
creativity.

In this book, Lessig identifies victims even closer to home: our
children. "How," Lessig asks, is the war on piracy "changing how they
think about normal, right-thinking behavior?" The creative practices of
today's youth include a range of activities -- file sharing, most
notoriously, but also the production of mashups -- that are illegal
under the current copyright regime, but criminalization is having
little success as a deterrent. Instead, the focus on "piracy" is
changing our relationship to the law itself, which has come to seem
arbitrary and unfair, and it's hampering creative and educational uses
of new technologies. It's time to consider, Lessig argues, whether the
costs of this war are too high.

As recently as 100 years ago, the majority of the
music that Americans heard was that which they made themselves, or
which others around them made. Prior to the popularization of the
player piano, followed by the gramophone and the radio, music had to be
performed live, and for that reason, an amateur culture of music making
flourished. The spread of technologies for the recording and playback
of music thus didn't democratize music itself but rather the ability of
the masses to hear professionals play. The end result, as Lessig points
out, was in fact highly anti-democratic, replacing an amateur culture
with a professional culture and transforming much of the populace from
producers into consumers. As music (along with other artistic
practices) became increasingly professionalized, it also became
increasingly subject to ideas of ownership, with the result that
amateur uses of music's professional products became increasingly
restricted.

However, many of those amateur uses of professional culture
were restricted throughout the 20th century, not just by legislation
but also by the scarcity and cost of the technologies involved. Since
few people had access to recording facilities, for instance, the
unauthorized reproduction of music was a fairly limited affair. What
copyright controlled, for much of its existence, was thus the
professional reproduction of cultural texts -- usually in the form of
books and other printed matter -- and copyright law was understood to
restrict publishers from releasing competing versions of texts, rather
than restricting consumers in their uses of those texts.

The situation has of course changed, and changed
radically, in the age of the computer, as the technologies of cultural
production are available on an increasing number of desktops throughout
the country. On the positive side, this change has the potential to
transform a professionalized, read-only culture back into a widespread
amateur read-write culture. On the negative side, however, computer
technologies have caused the jurisdiction of copyright law to spread
from producers to consumers and thereby increasingly restrict the uses
we can make of the culture we participate in.